The U.S. Military Government and the Establishment of Democratic Reform, Federalism, and Constitutionalism During the Occupation of Bavaria, 1945-47

• Author: Lieautenant Colonel Walter M. Hudson
• Pages: 04

2004] U.S. MILITARY GOV'T & OCCUPATION OF BAVARIA 115

THE U.S. MILITARY GOVERNMENT AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF DEMOCRATIC REFORM, FEDERALISM, AND CONSTITUTIONALISM DURING THE OCCUPATION OF BAVARIA, 1945-47

LIEUTENANT COLONEL WALTER M. HUDSON1

1. Introduction

   In the spring of 1945, the United States Army established a military government in Bavaria, a German state (Land) caught in a maelstrom of defeat and near-anarchy. Its public works, courts, and school systems had broken down completely. Cities and towns lay in waste. Allied air attacks destroyed 80 percent of Munich, Bavaria's once proud capital, and its population had fallen from 830,000 to 475,000.2 The Americans who captured the city described it as a place of desolation and despair: "People came out of their roofless, windowless apartments or cold cellars and, as if by reflex,

   1. Judge Advocate General's Corps, United States Army. Chief, Military Law Office and Instructor, Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS. This article is an edited version of a thesis presented to the faculty of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College to satisfy, in part, the requirements for a Master of Military Art and Science degree in military history in 2001.

      I would like to express my gratitude to my thesis committee, Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Marvin L. Meek, Major Andrew S. Harvey, and Dr. Samuel J. Lewis. I further appreciate the insights into German society and culture I gained while taking Dr. Lewis's elective on German military history while a student at Command and General Staff College. In addition, I am grateful that during my nearly two years spent in Germany as the Deputy Staff Judge Advocate, 1st Armored Division, my superiors, in particular LTC Mark S. Mar-tins, Colonel (COL) William H. McCoy, Jr., and COL Jackson L. Flake, III, allowed me opportunities to study and travel in Germany, further increasing my understanding of its history, culture, and language. I am also indebted to the librarians and archivists at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, the archival assistants at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and the librarians, archivists, and assistants at the Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, as well as my parents, COL (Ret.) and Mrs. William A. Hudson, for their encouragement and support. I dedicate this article to the memory of Walter J. Muller (1895-1967), Major General, United States Army, and Director, Office of Military Government for Bavaria (OMGB), October 1945-November, 1947.

   2. U.S. MILITARY POLICE SCHOOL, CASE STUDIES ON FIELD OPERATIONS OF MILITARY

      GOVERNMENT UNITS 77 (1950) [hereinafter CASE STUDIES]. An American postwar observer described Germany as "a country without cities. The countryside is practically untouched and in many spots as picturesque as ever. But in a physical and to a large degree psychological sense, the cities no longer exist." JULIAN BACH, AMERICA'S GERMANY: AN ACCOUNT

      OF THE OCCUPATION 17 (1946).

      began to move along the streets. From force of habit, some lined in front of food stores that did not open. . . . They were all dazed, scarcely moving to avoid the American tanks and artillery that rumbled past."3

      In many ways, Bavaria had been the region of Germany most resilient to National Socialism. 4 Yet it was also the wellspring of the Nazi movement.5 Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in Landsberg Prison after leading the unsuccessful 1923 Munich Putsch. He held huge Nazi Party rallies in the northern Bavarian city of Nuremberg. His retreat house was in the mountain resort of Berchtesgaden, near the Austrian border. Despite Bavaria's separatism and Catholicism, Nazi ideology had nonetheless made inroads into Bavarian life, from schoolbooks and youth groups to professional organizations. 6 In the midst of all this, the U.S. Army, as the military government from 1945 to 1947, was to rebuild Bavaria physically and, perhaps even more dauntingly, reform it politically.7

      1. Setting the Stage

      When the Allies defeated and occupied Germany in the spring of 1945, the major powers agreed that there was to be no repeat of 1918.8 Germany was never again to emerge as a belligerent, dictatorial state. Germany was not simply to be defeated; it was to become a wholly new nation. But what that new nation would be was not at first certain. Under the influence of Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, there were proposals put forth within President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration to "pastoralize" Germany. 9 It was also uncertain what kind of government Germany

   3. BACH, supra note 2, at 17.

   4. Until 1806, Bavaria consisted of Upper and Lower Bavaria and the Upper Palatinate, areas that were completely Catholic. In 1806, Bavaria formed an alliance with Napoleon and as a result acquired Franconia to the north and Swabia (Schwaben) to the east, predominately Catholic areas. After the Bismarck Constitution of 1871, Bavaria became part of the German nation, but retained special rights and preserved its monarchy. Bismarck's Kulturkampf (the conflict between the German government under Bismarck and the Roman Catholic Church) occurred in the 1870s when he attempted to attack Catholic institutions throughout Germany. His attempts backfired and Catholicism emerged more powerful than before. GEOFFREY PRIDHAM, HITLER'S RISE TO POWER: THE NAZI MOVEMENT IN

      BAVARIA, 1923-1933, 1-11 (1973); D. R. DORONODO, BAVARIA AND GERMAN FEDERALISM 1-4 (1992). It should be noted that Bavaria did not feel the weight of the Kulturkampf as strongly as did other German regions, notably Prussia. ALLAN MITCHELL, REVOLUTION IN

      BAVARIA, 1918-1919: THE EISNER REGIME AND THE SOVIET REPUBLIC 12 (1965).

      would have. Indeed, at the Allied war conferences at Quebec and Yalta, democratization of Germany was not a high priority.10

      As the defeat of Germany became evident, however, democratization moved to the center of America's occupation policy. Set forth in United States Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive (JCS) 1067, democratization later became official policy that the major Allied powers at the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945 ratified and clarified.11 Taken together, JCS 1067 and the Potsdam Declarations indicated that political life would

   5. Following Germany's surrender in November 1918, a short-lived radical Socialist and Marxist regime succeeded the toppled Bavarian monarchy (House of Wittelsbach). It was initially led by Kurt Eisner (assassinated in February 1919 by an archconservative) and then followed, in April 1919, by a Soviet style regime. Bavarian and other German paramilitary units suppressed it in May 1919. The impact of the Soviet style government had an immense impact on Bavarian political consciousness:

      It would be hard to exaggerate the impact on political consciousness in Bavaria of the events between November 1918 and May 1919, and quite especially of the Räterepublik [the Soviet style government briefly established in April 1919]. At its very mildest, it was experienced in Munich itself as a time of curtailed freedom, severe food shortages, press censorship, general strike, sequestration of foodstuffs, coal, and items of clothing, and general disorder and chaos. But of more lasting significance, it went down in popular memory as a "rule of horror" (Schrenkensherrschaft) imposed by foreign elements in the service of Soviet commuism.

      IAN KERSHAW, HITLER, 1889-1938: HUBRIS 114 (1998). The Eisner regime and the short-lived Bavarian Soviet also fanned the fires of anti-Semitism and xenophobia, Eisner and prominent figures in the Soviet regime being "non-Bavarian" Jews. ROBERT S. GARNETT,

      LION, EAGLE, AND SWASTIKA: BAVARIAN MONARCHISM IN WEIMAR GERMANY, 1918-1933, 41

      (1991). See also MITCHELL, supra note 4, passim. The subsequent 1919 constitution of the

      Weimar Republic took most of the remaining vestiges of Bavarian autonomy away, tying Bavaria to the more leftwing central government in Berlin. Throughout the 1920's, a strong right-wing backlash took hold in Bavaria, with many Bavarians believing Bavaria should be a "cell of order" against the liberal and Marxist north. PRIDHAM, supra note 4, at 7; KERSHAW,supra, at 169, 171; GARNETT, supra, at 51-64. Despite the rightwing reaction, throughout the 1920s, most Bavarians rejected Nazism. Instead, the rightwing, populist Catholic Bavarian People's Party (BVP), formed in 1918, and emerged as the dominant political force. PRIDHAM, supra note 4, at 322. Voting patterns indicated that support for Nazism was weak or lukewarm in Bavaria throughout the decade, more so in the more Catholic south. There was a gradual, steady nine year increase of the Nazi vote from 1924 to 1933. Id. Although Bavaria averaged a far higher percentage of the vote at the beginning of Nazism in 1924 (16% to 6.5% for Germany overall), in the March, 1933 elections, Bavaria's percentage of the electorate voting for Nazism was actually slightly less than the overall German electorate (43.1% to 43.9% for Germany overall). Id. The Nazis finally broke the BVP hold in old Bavaria when it consolidated its national power in 1933. Id. at 4.

      resume in Germany, an autonomous government would at some point be restored, and the form of government would be democratic.12

      Restoring a democratic government to Germany was a formidable challenge that many thought would take a generation.13 For twelve years, the Nazi government strove to achieve a society based on the principle of Gleichschaltung, forced synchronization, in which all aspects of life--familial, communal, professional, religious, and governmental--fell under a centralized, pyramidical governmental system of control and coercion. The Nazi regime sought submission to the Führerprinzip-absolute loyalty to Hitler: youths were taught to honor Hitler before their parents, the Reich co-opted religious clergy, and professional organizations turned into adjuncts of the Nazi Party.14

      The victorious Allies thus reckoned that military...